Voting in Michigan is about to undergo unprecedented changes, and among those changes will be the option of at least nine days of in-person early voting.
What that looks like to voters will depend on where in the state they live.
The House and Senate passed legislation Wednesday that allows municipal and county governments to decide the exact number of early voting days and the number of polling places.
Early voting is the centerpiece of a series of landmark changes to elections that legislators are putting into place after the passage of ballot Proposal 2 last November.
Upper Peninsula Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, broke with his political party and is the lone Republican co-sponsor of the early voting bill.
“We’re writing a historic new chapter for voting in the state of Michigan,” Democratic state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who chairs the Senate’s committee on elections and ethics, said in a hearing introducing his bills last week.
On Thursday, the voting-rights advocacy organization Voters Not Politicians appealed to volunteers to help support efforts to get funding to put the voting reforms into effect.
“Our team of staff and volunteers interviewed 35 municipal election clerks across the state and these clerks overwhelmingly stressed the need for appropriate funding in order to carry out the 2024 election. Michigan’s 1,603 election jurisdictions depend on the legislature to fund the expanded voting access that they are constitutionally required to provide,” VNP wrote in its newsletter appeal.
This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan. Read more here: https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/michigan-moves-adopt-early-voting-republicans-say-efforts-go-too-far
